ISG report causing fissures in GOP

Lots happening in the world and I’ve been busy doing (gasp!) non-blog things. So I’ll throw together a couple of shorts here before going to get some rest..
First up: the continuing fallout from the ISG report, inside US politics. John Broder and Robin Toner have a good round-up in Sunday’s NYT of the very divisive effect the report has been having within the GOP:

A document that many in Washington had hoped would pave the way for a bipartisan compromise on Iraq instead drew sharp condemnation from the right, with hawks saying it was a wasted effort that advocated a shameful American retreat.
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page described the report as a “strategic muddle,” Richard Perle called it “absurd,” Rush Limbaugh labeled it “stupid,” and The New York Post portrayed the leaders of the group, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic member of Congress, as “surrender monkeys.”
Republican moderates clung to the report, mindful of the drubbing the party received in last month’s midterm elections largely because of Iraq. They said they hoped President Bush would adopt the group’s principal recommendations and begin the process of disengagement from the long and costly war. But White House officials who conducted a preliminary review of the report said they had concluded that many of the proposals were impractical or unrealistic.
The divisions could make it more difficult for Republicans to coalesce on national security policy and avoid a bitter intraparty fight going into the 2008 campaign.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, rejected the major recommendations of the group because they did not present a formula for victory. Mr. McCain, hoping to claim the Republican mantle on national security issues, has staked out a muscular position on Iraq, calling for an immediate increase in American forces to try to bring order to Baghdad and crush the insurgency.
…[T]he debate will go to the heart of the party’s identity — and its image as the party of strength on national security — after Mr. Bush’s aggressive post-Sept. 11 foreign policy brought electoral successes in 2002 and 2004 but was profoundly challenged by voters this year.
… Republicans are already engaged in soul-searching over the results of the recent election, trying to figure out how the party can regain the faith of the American people on questions of war and peace.
The ambivalence and introspection were summed up by Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, who spoke at length in the Senate this week about the dangers of withdrawing from Iraq but said he could no longer support the status quo.
“I, for one, am at the end of my rope when it comes to supporting a policy that has our soldiers patrolling the same streets in the same way, being blown up by the same bombs day after day,” Mr. Smith said. “That is absurd. It may even be criminal. I cannot support that anymore. I believe we need to figure out how to fight the war on terror and to do it right. So either we clear and hold and build, or let’s go home.”
The frustration was widespread among Congressional Republicans, some of whom were serving their final days in office this week after an election largely influenced by the public’s unhappiness with the war.

Here’s some more about Sen. Smith, from his home-state’s leading paper, The Oregonian: An editorial there commented that in making his statement in the Senate Thursday night, Smith,

broke ranks with such hawks as Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and the president himself. He placed himself among such colleagues as Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who have said the United States must withdraw from Iraq as quickly as possible.
While Smith used blunt language — “let’s cut and run, or cut and walk, or let us fight the war on terror more intelligently than we have” — his remarks didn’t signal as abrupt a break as it might have appeared.
He acknowledged Thursday that he had voted to allow the president to invade, that he had hoped U.S. forces would find secret caches of weapons of mass destruction, that he was thrilled by the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein and was heartened by the way Iraqis turned out to vote three times in national elections.
But after he visited Oregon National Guard troops near Kirkuk in March last year, he said, “We can be a counterproductive force for Iraqi democracy if we are there longer than is necessary. My own hunch is somewhere between 18 months to two years, the American presence in Iraq will be much reduced.”
It’s been 18 months and the presence hasn’t been reduced at all. Nor is a functional central government much closer to asserting itself. Nor is the Iraqi economy any stronger. Nor are U.S. troops dying any less frequently. And more Iraqis are being killed each month than ever.
As a partial explanation for why he chose to speak now, Smith harked back to his visit to the Kirkuk region. He said one soldier told him: “Senator, don’t tell me you support the troops and not our mission.” That, the senator said, gave him pause.
But 18 months later, with billions of dollars flushed away, thousands more bodies under the ground and no end in sight, the senator’s pause is over.
His comments strengthen his hand in advance of his 2008 re-election campaign. They would seem to place him closer to the position of voters who kicked his party out of power last month and certainly closer to the sentiments of most of blue-state Oregon.
But personal political calculations aside, the timing of Smith’s remarks helped to increase the pressure on President Bush to break with his policies of the last 18 months. The election results, the ouster of Donald Rumsfeld as defense secretary in favor of a man who says America is not winning in Iraq and the arrival of the Iraq Study Group report make this a propitious moment in our political history.
It is a moment when the president must acknowledge what is obvious even to his former supporters in the U.S. Senate. It is time to reset American policy in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
There is more virtue in admitting a mistake than there is in repeating it, over and over.

Well said.